> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Divided - URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/divided/ - Published: 2026-05-17T13:35:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-06T13:36:00.000Z - Description: There were too many iris at the farmhouse in Virginia. And too few here. So Sarah got out the shovel. - Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach - Tags: ep-19 There were too many iris at the farmhouse in Virginia. And too few here. So Sarah got out the shovel. She divided the clump the way you divide iris — not gently, but decisively, cutting through the roots, separating what had grown together, wrapping half of it in wet newspaper for the drive north. Too hearty to be hurt by halving, we carried it home in a bucket in the back of the car, between the children's bags and whatever else accumulates on a long family drive. They came up blue-violet, the color of the sky just before rain, in a raised bed that looks across the pond opposite the church. Now they are everywhere. At the house, in the garden, at the church. Spreading. Here is what I have been sitting with all week. When we are in Virginia now, we think of here. And when we are here, we think of there. The iris made us homesick in both directions at once. That’s not loss. That’s what happens when love gets into the ground and refuses to stay in just one place. This past Thursday was Ascension Day. It is one of the quieter feasts on the church calendar, observed mostly by the faithful few who maybe come to a weekday service and leave before the rest of the world has finished its coffee. But what it marks is not quiet at all. Forty days after Easter, the disciples gathered with Jesus on a hillside. And then he was gone. Taken up, the text says, into a cloud. The disciples stood there staring into the sky. And two figures appeared beside them and said, essentially: why are you standing here looking up? He’s gone. And something else is coming. It is easy to hear that as a rebuke. It’s not. It’s an announcement. Because Jesus himself had said it plainly, the night before he died: it is to your advantage that I go away. If I do not go away, the Spirit will not come. He was not abandoning them. He was going where his generous love was needed next. Not away from the world but further into it, and beyond it, drawing all things toward what they were always meant to become. Bounded by a body in Galilee, he could only be only in one place at a time. Freed from that boundary, he could be everywhere the Spirit moves. In every watershed. In every garden. At the pond's edge on a Thursday morning in May. The iris have no map. It doesn't know it crossed state lines, that it rode north in a bucket between a child's backpack and someone's neglected water bottle. It doesn't know it left one watershed and entered another. It only knows what iris know: that there is ground here, and light, and that is sufficient. It bloomed anyway. It’s already spreading. That is how good news travels. Not by force, not by plan, but by the logic of generous love, which cannot encounter good ground without wanting to take root in it. Sarah didn't carry the iris north because she calculated the outcome. She carried it there because there were too many in Virginia and too few here, and love notices that kind of imbalance and does something about it. We carry everything with us. Where we have been, what we have loved, who has loved us. The water in St. John's Pond has been rain, has been river, has been ocean. It holds all of it without effort, without grief, without holding on. The iris holds Virginia somehow in its roots and blooms in Cold Spring Harbor. That’s not two things. That’s one thing, spreading. The disciples learned this. They stood on that hillside feeling left behind and discovered they had been sent forward. The Spirit came ten days later, like wind, like fire, like the sudden capacity to be understood across every language at once. It came the way spring comes to a garden that has been transplanted, and watered, and waited on. Not when demanded. When the ground was ready. Love does this. It makes you want to be generous. It makes you want to share. And once it gets into the ground, it cannot stop. **A Prayer:** God of the hillside and the garden: you went all the way down into the ground of our lives, and all the way up, drawing everything with you. When we stand staring at empty sky, turn our faces toward what is coming. Teach us to carry what we love the way water carries everything: completely, without loss, on the way to becoming something larger. Through Christ, who ascended so that nothing and no one would be left behind. Amen.